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Rights of the Person: Campaign to deepen and broaden the concept of human rights.

Longer, Better Lives: Case for longer healthier lives, addressing objections to life extension, challenge ageist and ableist attitudes that discourage the full utilization of health technology.

Envisioning the Future: Collection of images of posthumanity and non-human intelligence, positive, negative and neutral, e.g., in science fiction and popular culture; engagement with cultural critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers in exploring the lessons to be derived from these.

The origins and activities of the Institute have elicited various reactions. Wesley J. Smith wrote that the Institute has one of the most active transhumanist websites, and the writers write on the "nonsense of uploading minds into computers and fashioning a post humanity."[33] Smith also criticized the results of the Institute's online poll that indicated the majority of Institute's readers are atheist or agnostic.[33] According to Smith, this was evidence that transhumanism is a religion and a desperate attempt to find purpose in a nihilistic and materialistic world.[33] The Institute's advocacy project to raise the status of animals to the legal status of personhood also drew criticism from Smith because he claimed human's are exceptional and raising the status of animals may lower the status of humans.[34]

That's the curious thing about the folks at the Stanford conference. Some were from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, an offshoot of the World Transhumanist Association, which advocates the transformation of our species through drugs, "genetic engineering, information technology ... nanotechnology, machine intelligence, uploading, and space colonization." [...] These are weird people with weird ideas. But sometimes it takes a weirdo to see what's odd about what the rest of us call normal. [...] Maybe the cockeyed thinking of transhumanists is what allows them to see the illogic of the way we dope kids with caffeine while banning other stimulants. Maybe that's why they find it odd that we denounce steroids as cheating but ignore athletes who get Lasik or muscle-enhancing surgery. Maybe that's why they look back at the doubling of human life expectancy in the last century and wonder why we shouldn't try to double it again. To our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they figure, we already look posthuman. Meanwhile, they look at cyborg technology and see in it what's human.

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies has become in my view, and possibly always was, a stealthy organization seeking to help legitimize the institutional positions and media reputations of key members of the World Transhumanist Organization, the better to increase membership and funding for that and other transhumanists organizations, as well as to mainstream the specific assertions of belief shared by those who identify as "transhumanists" in particular, under cover of a more serious discourse about emerging technoscientific change more generally. There is nothing wrong with such an agenda (even if I don't personally agree with it), although it seems to me that for the same reasons that the WTA website is not likely to achieve, in its explicit transhumanist form, either mainstream or academic respectability any time soon, neither would IEET were its apparently insistent connection to the WTA better known.